Ingram Micro is realigning its Solutions Group around key practice areas in a bid to take a more strategic approach to solution selling.

The four new practices are virtualisation, security, unified communications (UC) and applications and business tools. Commercial and solutions director, John Walters, said a lot of its Solutions Group work was initially driven by product-centric business units.

"While that's important, and vendors need to meet quarterly numbers, our position is to set up a broader structure to continue to drive that solutions play rather than just drive product sales," Walters said.

"A large number of our major vendors will play in each of these practices. It will be the practice manager's responsibility to manage their tactical vendor portfolio as well as develop go-to market strategies for their broader practice."

The decision follows the appointment of Stuart Ellis as general manager across Ingram's Solutions Group last month. As previously reported in ARN, he is tasked with bringing the distributor's infrastructure and licensing teams closer together.

Ingram's former Juniper business manager, Peter Polari, will take charge of the virtualisation practice, while the UC team will be headed by former networking product manager, Pieter Vanderschaar. Ingram's former security manager, David Power, will run the security practice and look at developing technology and physical security solutions.

Walters said the company was now looking for an external candidate to head up the applications and business tools practice. Ingram's IBM business manager, Lisa Youlden, and HP enterprise business manager, Denise Plessas, will continue to look after their chosen vendors but will also be given strategic assignments. Walters said Youlden would take charge of its green practice.

Ellis said practice managers would also look at signing complementary vendors within their chosen area from Q1 next year. Ingram also aims to ramp up its services capabilities to include capacity planning, migration and best-of-breed offerings.

He played down any fears of treading on reseller toes for services business, saying it would target areas where there was a skills gap. Walters added Ingram's focus was on pre-sales services, not post-sales.

"For example, the major virtualisation vendors are doing some heavy recruitment and that's an area where there's a real need for skills from a distributor," Ellis said. "There's a large education and enablement piece being driven in the tier-two space and we will be the support for that."